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The Collection: Film Review

It’s the most wonderful time of the year . . . for Christmas torture porn movies, that is. “Sleigh bells” and “nutcrackers” take on an entirely new meaning when the season is hijacked by a psychopath who likes to collect skulls and body parts. The man in the red suit is wearing blood. Literally.

I’ve never been a fan of movies like Saw which are basically a series of scenes in which a psychopath serial killer invents as many ways to kill his victims as possible (feminists, I hear you: why are the serial killers never women?!). The Collection tries to one-up this age-old formula (it’s from Saw writers Marcus Dunstan and Patrick Melton) but in the end it is about as serviceable as one can expect from a duo most famous for movies about deranged lunatics forcing their victims to play sadistic games before they kill them off.

(Side note: I imagine this is how Donald Trump fantasizes about the poor and his many objects of fomented Twitter rage. But that’s another story – and sadly one we’ll probably never get to see on screen… Another side note: can we just kill him already?)

As it is also directed by Dunstan in his debut effort, the plot is fairly straightforward: a young woman named Elena (Emma Fitzpatrick) is kidnapped from a party at a secret location by a psychopath killer known only as The Collector. Her father, who is loaded like Daddy Warbucks, recruits the only man known to have escaped The Collector: Arkin (Josh Stewart), who reluctantly agrees to go back in and face his would-be killer one final time.

It doesn’t take much imagining to figure out how things work out, but suffice is to say there will be a sequel. If they can make six Saw movies, they can surely make a sequel to this one.